The ideas for this double-sized issue of Peacebuilder were planted more than two years ago. James and Marian Payne, CJP donors who have been generous beyond our imagination, asked simple yet profound questions: “How can CJP’s peacebuilding philosophy become more globally recognized? How can CJP expand its impact in the world?”

As we discussed options, we landed on several strategies, including a special edition of Peacebuilder to explore the impact of initiatives that have emerged from EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute.

The Paynes provided the funds for EMU communications staff to travel around the world and gather these compelling stories. From South Korea to South Africa to the South Pacific, from Mozambique to Manitoba, from the Philippines to India, staff circled the globe to learn about the successes and struggles of educational initiatives run by CJP-linked peacebuilders.

The ripple effects of these peacebuilding initiatives are nothing short of amazing.

And yet many of them wrestle with the same issues we face at CJP. How can peacebuilding organizations be financially viable for the long term, while remaining accessible to all who wish to expand their peacebuilding knowledge and skills? How do these centers continue to engage with their alumni in ways that are mutually beneficial?

As you read this issue of Peacebuilder, I believe you will agree that the peacebuilding field – and the funders and advocates who want it to succeed – have much to learn from these stories.

Keep in mind, though, CJP alumni are changing the world through work in other venues too – by consulting, working for NGOs, teaching in universities, and serving in government roles or with the United Nations. Others have promoted peacebuilding by becoming social entrepreneurs.

With this issue of Peacebuilder, we say goodbye to Bonnie Price Lofton, a 2004 graduate of CJP’s master’s program, who birthed this magazine in 2005. This special issue marks the 16th that she has edited and, in most cases, researched and written. Her commitment to staying in touch with fellow alumni, and remembering the smallest details about their lives, has been extraordinary. Thank you, Bonnie!

We also welcome Lauren Jefferson as the new editor-in-chief for Peacebuilder, which will now become an annual publication.

Marian and James Payne, who did their undergraduate studies at EMU in the late 1950s, were CJP’s founding donors two decades ago. In recent years they conceived of and funded the exploration of 12 SPI-inspired initiatives around the world for publication in Peacebuilder. (Photo by Matthew Styer)

These three have never met – Marian and James Payne, residing in Richmond, Virginia, and Mulanda Jimmy Juma, residing in Johannesburg, South Africa – but all began a journey toward peacebuilding a quarter of a century ago.

The trails they’ve taken have intersected at multiple junctures, without their knowing it.

The Paynes are retired Pennsylvania educators, now in their early 80s, who chose in 1993 to be the founding donors of what is today the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) at Eastern Mennonite University, their undergraduate alma mater.

Juma, a native of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was a 20-year-old university student in his home country when CJP held its first peacebuilding workshop in Harrisonburg, Virginia, during the summer of 1994.

The Paynes had been persuaded of the importance of an EMU-based conflict transformation program as a result, in part, of meetings at EMU with sociology professor Vernon Jantzi and with mediation experts Ron Kraybill and John Paul Lederach, who had both previously led Mennonite Conciliation Service. (Kraybill visited Virginia periodically while earning a doctorate of religion at the University of Capetown in South Africa in the mid-1990s.)

At age 20, Juma had already survived multiple bouts of warfare in the Great Lakes region of Africa. His father was an educated man, respected in their village – which made him and his family the target of whichever set of armed combatants were sweeping through. Juma recalls hiding at age 4 under a rock with his 6-year-old sister as they tried not to breathe, listening to soldiers calling them “insects” and hunting to shoot them. His father was imprisoned and tortured nearly to death. A sister was raped and never able to function normally again. Juma became a refugee and eventually fled his country, arriving in South Africa in 1999.

Juma began corresponding with Carl Stauffer, a 1984 social work graduate of EMU, who lived in South Africa for 16 years and was MCC’s regional peace adviser for the southern Africa region from 2000 to 2009. In 2002, Stauffer arranged for MCC to give Juma a scholarship to attend the six-week training program of the Africa Peacebuilding Institute (API) in Zambia. This was also the year that Stauffer completed his master’s degree in conflict transformation at CJP and returned to teach at API. It was the third year that API was operational.

API’s training materials and teaching techniques, then and now, strongly resemble those assembled in MCC’s Mediation and Facilitation Training Manual, first published in 1989 under Lederach’s co-editorship, as well as those used to this day in CJP’s courses.

(Jantzi first developed CJP’s curriculum, partly in consultation with James Payne. In addition to being a major donor to CJP, Payne was a long-time education professor, with expertise in curriculum development.)

Common roots

Befitting their common roots, both API and CJP employ experiential-style instruction, where students do not sit hour after hour listening to lectures, but instead do role plays, storytelling, artwork and other exercises designed to elicit responses. The idea is for students to internalize the lessons and adapt them to their own situations. Lederach popularized this approach, dubbing it “elicitive” and “reflective.”

Another indicator of common roots is the term “conflict transformation,” rather than “conflict” paired with the word “resolution,” “management” or “analysis.” Lederach coined and popularized “conflict transformation,” for reasons explained in chapter 1 of his Little Book of Conflict Transformation (2003).*

Juma became an API trainer while resuming collegiate studies interrupted by wars in the Congo. In 2009, when Stauffer completed his doctorate in South Africa and returned to Virginia to join the CJP faculty, Juma succeeded him as MCC’s regional peace coordinator for southern Africa for three years.

Today, Juma holds a PhD in politics, human rights and sustainability from Italy’s Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and is the coordinator of peace studies and senior lecturer at St. Augustine College in Johannesburg, South Africa, where API now holds its summer training sessions. He is also API’s executive director.

In the summer of 2015, Juma will set foot on EMU’s campus for the first time, arriving to co-teach an SPI course with Stauffer, “Justice in Transition: Restorative and Indigenous Applications in Post-war Contexts.”

Juma and the Paynes will be in proximity to each other at last – 25 years after they all began their separate, but oddly overlapping, life journeys.

Around the world, thanks to the Paynes

Until then, the main connecting thread between Juma and the Paynes is me, the outgoing editor of Peacebuilder. I was able to interview Juma in South Africa on December 5, 2014, while on an around-the-world journalism expedition funded by the Paynes.

With their usual farsightedness, Marian and James Payne conceived of the idea of reporting on SPI-type institutes globally. It took four writers and nine photographers to cover 12 peacebuilding initiatives on four continents and several islands during the closing months of 2014. The Paynes saw this as an excellent way of documenting the impact of SPI at its 20th anniversary year.

I see this mammoth project as testimony to the Paynes themselves. Likely none of this would have happened if they had not stepped forward 20 years ago with a promise to cover any shortfalls experienced by the conflict transformation program in its inaugural year at EMU. They have been devoted, generous supporters of CJP ever since.

Our journalistic explorations yielded this remarkable finding: Thousands who claim EMU as their alma mater not only share the same educational DNA, they often collaborate with EMU-linked partners around the world, feeling kinship with (and deriving support from) those who speak the same language of peacebuilding and who hold the same aspirations for a peaceful world based on justice for all. In small and large ways – from improved family relationships to war-ending dialogues – they’re building a better world.

* John Paul Lederach wrote that using the term “conflict transformation” implies not focusing simplistically on the resolution of a specific set of problems. Instead one’s vision is wider and longer term – to build “healthy relationships and communities, locally and globally.” It is also understood that conflict is normal in human relationships and a motor of change.

]]>http://emu.edu/now/peacebuilder/2015/07/intersecting-paths-towards-justice-and-peace/feed/0http://emu.edu/now/peacebuilder/2015/07/intersecting-paths-towards-justice-and-peace/From SPI to 12 Initiatives for Peacebuildinghttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/emu/peacebuilder/~3/xLN9_b7JXbA/
http://emu.edu/now/peacebuilder/2015/07/from-spi-to-12-initiatives-for-peacebuilding/#commentsTue, 28 Jul 2015 17:36:12 +0000http://emu.edu/now/peacebuilder/?p=7143At age 20, EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute has directly inspired the creation of 12 other intensive peacebuilding training programs in Africa, Europe, the South Pacific, North America, and Northeast and Southeast Asia, all of which are explored in this issue of Peacebuilder. The training programs operate under the following entities, listed in chronological order of year officially founded.[1]

Henry Martyn Institute’s (HMI) Peacebuilder Training Program – 1999-2000 – headquartered in Hyderabad, India, but serving all of India, with a special focus on ethnic minority regions in the far northeast of India.

The Peacebuilding and Development Institute at American University – summer of 2001 (closed after 2013 summer session by university administrators) – Washington D.C.

Just Peace Initiatives – 2005 – headquartered in Peshawar, Pakistan, serving all of Pakistan, with a particular focus on the northwest region where violent conflicts have a regional impact extending into Afghanistan.

The Peace Academy in Sarajevo – 2007 – based in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzogovina (has not offered intensive trainings since 2012, but hopes are for resumption in 2016), serving post-Yugoslavia populations emerging from violent conflict.

Pacific Centre for Peacebuilding – 2007 – headquartered in Suva, Fiji, but with wide focus on all South Pacific islands.

Northeast Asia Regional Peacebuilding – 2008 – headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, but with summer peacebuilding sessions that rotate among South Korea, Japan, China and Mongolia. A sister group, the Korea Peacebuilding Institute, emerged in 2012.

Canadian School For Peacebuilding – 2009 – in Winnipeg, Canada, attracting participants widely, but especially serving western

Most of these training centers call to mind SPI in its early years – attracting practitioners in the field who hunger for more training and not necessarily credit toward a graduate degree. By conservative estimate, the centers collectively train more than 2,000 people annually in mediation, restorative justice, trauma healing, healthy organizational leadership, and other approaches to conflict transformation. And, of course, these trainees spread peacebuilding techniques to others. (We’ll explore the impacts of each of the centers in their individual stories.)

All 12 of the training centers have adopted materials and educational approaches that are reminiscent and evocative of SPI, the oldest peacebuilding institute of its kind – which makes sense, given the regular exchanges of instructors, who typically have long-standing connections to SPI’s umbrella institution, the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP).

Of the 26 instructors teaching at SPI 2015, for example, 18 have taught at one of the other dozen peacebuilding centers listed above and 13 are alumni of CJP.[2]

Reflecting with pleasure on the emergence of SPI-inspired peacebuilding centers around the world since the 1990s, CJP founding director John Paul Lederach says that CJP and SPI can act as “incubators,” birthing ever-better peacebuilding theory and practices.

While many of the other centers are working in situations where they must be highly sensitive to their immediate context and thus focused close to the ground, Lederach believes CJP can serve as a “place of safety” and as a “convener” of conversations necessary for cross-fertilization, learning and growth.

CJP can also walk alongside those who are just starting out, he says, helping them to connect to the worldwide network of practitioners and to learn from their predecessors committed to building justice and peace.

Caveats in crediting CJP

Tracing the proliferation of peacebuilding training centers around the world to their origins is a bit like trying to determine which spring, stream or river contributed which molecules of water to the bay of an ocean.

The hunger for peace amid violent conflict, the desire to learn peacebuilding skills, and the efforts of peacemakers from every walk of life and tradition – these know no boundaries. They extend across all religions.

Yet our focus in this Peacebuilder is necessarily narrow, mainly limited to how the Mennonite “peace church” tradition has given rise to practices and terminology that are transforming conflict around the world. That’s not to say that other traditions have not made major contributions, or that Mennonites have acted on their own (far from it, as you’ll see in these pages).

But when the world seems bleak and hopelessness begs at one’s door, it helps to stop and reflect on how much has been accomplished by Mennonite initiatives in the last 20 years, relying mainly on dedicated people rather than other resources.

The journey to founding CJP began in the 1980s, when two men from staunch Mennonite families, Lederach and Ron Kraybill, became successively the first two leaders of Mennonite

Conciliation Service. In 1985, Kraybill organized the service’s first summer training institute for 20 Mennonite attendees. Kraybill’s first hand-outs on how to mediate were printed on cheap blue paper and distributed in a manila folder.

By 1988, his handouts had gradually been enlarged into a spiral-bound manual, with additions from Lederach, David Brubaker (now a CJP faculty member), Jim Stutzman, Carolyn Schrock-Shenk and others. (Brubaker gets the credit for deciding that 40 pages of handouts would work better in a loose-leaf binder.) Contributors to the manuals were all leading trainings on their own, sometimes in conjunction with the Lombard Peace Mennonite Center near Chicago, which had been established by Richard Blackburn in 1984 to address congregational conflict.

In 1989, Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) published the first edition of what is now in its 5th edition, updated in 2008 under the title Conflict Transformation and Restorative Justice Manual: Foundations and Skills for Mediation and Facilitation. (The 2000 edition was titled Mediation and Facilitation Training Manual: Foundations and Skills for Constructive Conflict Transformation.)

In the early 1990s, Kraybill and Lederach began talking about the need to systematically address conflict – particularly the need to prepare others for working in the field – rather than continue the Lone Ranger approach.

Meanwhile at EMU, other field-experienced academics were having similar thoughts. Early in 1990, Joseph Lapp, then president of EMU, received a letter from Richard (“Rick”) Yoder, professor of business and economics. Yoder was on leave from EMU at the time and working in Kenya with the Kenya Rural Enterprise Program.

His letter started by citing the need for Eastern Mennonite College (the “university” title did not come into use until 1994) to have a unique identity, one that would fill a serious gap in the world. “I think that EMC ought to be known as that peace college in Virginia,” wrote Yoder. He told this story to illustrate the need for Mennonite colleges to think seriously about offering peace studies:

I spent a couple days in rural Kenya with a U.S. congressional staffer from the House Foreign Affairs Committee and asked her questions as to how the U.S. is responding to all these, largely non-violent, political and economic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Her response was, ‘We really don’t know what to do; we don’t have the people or the tools to help us think in different paradigms!’Howsad, I thought; what do the Mennonites have to offer?[3]

In mid-1994, Kraybill and Lederach joined Hizkias Assefa, an Ethiopian scholar-peace practitioner based in Kenya, and Vernon Jantzi to teach conflict transformation skills to 40 participants at EMU’s “Frontiers of International Peacebuilding” workshop. The event was successful enough to be repeated in 1995, the same year that EMU admitted its first full class of master’s degree students in conflict transformation within a program directed by Lederach.

Soon after, in 1996, CJP deepened its justice focus by recruiting to its faculty Howard Zehr, an expert in restorative justice.

By 1996, the Frontiers workshop had evolved into a series of intensive classes under a name that has endured to this day – the Summer Peacebuilding Institute, or simply SPI.

In those early years, the Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conferences and SPI were simply opportunities for professional development and learning. But participants and graduate students in CJP began lobbying for SPI to offer the option of taking a course for academic credit. Today, not-for-credit trainees and graduate students share classes at SPI, though the latter must do more out-of-classroom coursework to earn their credits.

In 2014, SPI enrolled a total of 184 people from 36 countries. Over the years, SPI has attracted 2,800 people from 121 countries to EMU’s campus.

Upon his departure to the University of Notre Dame in 1999, Lederach was followed as director by Jantzi, then jointly HowardZehr and Ruth Zimmerman, then LynnRoth, and now J. Daryl Byler – all of whom came with extensive international experience in conflict zones.

For a more thorough look at the history and functioning of SPI, see the summer 2014 Peacebuilder.[4]

Footnotes

One caveat to this list of 12: Reasonable definitional arguments could be made for taking a few off this list and adding a number of other initiatives around the world. For example, the Nairobi Peace Initiative-Africa (NPI-Africa) was founded in 1984 by Harold and Annetta Miller, both early ‘60s grads of EMU who were working with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). NPI has an annual peacebuilding institute that has tapped CJP-trained alumni, such as John Katunga Murhula, MA ’05. The Great Lakes Peacebuilding Institute, founded in 2004 with seed money from MCC, serves Francophone peace practitioners with month-long trainings each October. Fidele Lumeya, MA ’00, and Krista Rigalo, MA ’00, have taught there, as has Mulanda Jimmy Juma, formerly MCC’s regional peace coordinator for southern Africa, who is teaching at SPI 2015.

Other examples of cross-fertilization: (1) Kenyan Babu Ayindo, MA ’98, has taught at SPI repeatedly and at SPI-like peacebuilding initiatives in seven other locations. (2) Sriprakash Mayasandra, a native of India who is MCC’s Asia Peace Coordinator, attended SPI in 2011 and 2013. He served on HMI’s governing board from 2008 to 2014 and has been a guiding hand for other peacebuilding initiatives, notably MPI, NARPI, and the Caux Scholars Program, Asia Plateau.

The Rick Yoder story was extracted from a history of CJP published in the 2005 inaugural issue of Peacebuilder, pages 3-7.

Babu Ayindo, MA ’98, has taught at seven SPI-type institutions all over the world, in addition to his frequent stints at SPI.

The spring/summer 2014 issue of Peacebuilder focusedon EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute at its 20th anniversary year. With the proliferation of peacebuildinginstitutes and workshops in Africa and elsewhere, is SPI still needed? In separate interviews, two Africans – one from Kenya and the other from Mozambique – answered “yes.”

In 1996, Babu Ayindo traveled from Kenya to be among the earliest students pursuing a master’s degree in conflict transformation at EMU. He had always been a “doer” and credits EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (within which SPI is nested) for valuing that.

“CJP has done a good job of identifying those practitioners who ordinarily would not have the time, patience or typical academic qualifications to enter an academic program,” he says, “It’s given them a great opportunity to study in the field and get credentials.”

Babu’s major take-away from CJP? “Meeting instructors and professors who believed in me and my interest in the role of storytelling, dramatization, and other arts in peacebuilding. Howard [Zehr], Ron [Kraybill], Vernon [Jantzi], Lisa [Schirch] and John Paul [Lederach] were very supportive – they believed in me. This is such an important thing – to be believed in, and to be given the room to make mistakes and to learn for yourself.”

Babu was impressed that though his professors were Mennonite-style Christians, “they respected those of us with different beliefs, including the spirituality of indigenous peoples.”

Babu was raised Roman Catholic, but like many Africans his religiousness is deeply rooted in his indigenous connections to his ancestors and the natural world. “In moments of crisis, I draw from that.”

He earned his MA in conflict transformation in 1998 and today, 17 years later, is pursuing a PhD in the field at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Babu is one of the most sought-after teachers of peacebuilding in the world. He has returned to teach at SPI repeatedly and at SPI-like peacebuilding initiatives in seven other locations: Washington D.C.; Fiji; Mindolo, Zambia; Nairobi, Kenya; Winnipeg, Canada; Davao, Philippines; and Caux, Switzerland. He is scheduled to teach at the Northeast Asia Regional Peacebuilding Institute in Mongolia in August 2015.

In Babu’s view, the basic courses taught at most of these institutions are not substantively different from those at CJP. But each institution needs a strategic vision for its own area of the world, he says. Those in the Global South need to work more at decolonization, including decolonizing the meaning of peace and justice and tapping their own indigenous paradigms for peace. In the Global North, CJP should focus on shifting the United States toward a more just, peaceful path, Babu says.

Methodist Bishop Dinis Matsolo of Mozambique agrees with that view. He credits Mennonites for spreading the theology of peace into churches around the world. Yet he asks, “Are Mennonites doing enough about U.S. policies, when I see the U.S. disregard the UN, start wars, and manufacture and use weapons widely?”

Nevertheless, Matsolo greatly values his month-long sojourn at SPI in 2005: “To taste the heavenly banquet of studying with people from all the different countries – even those who were almost at war with each other – inspired me to think it is possible to solve the world’s problems. We lived together and shared with each other and learned from each other.”

Matsolo has done coursework at two other peacebuilding institutes – one in his own country and the other in Zambia but he feels SPI represented the ultimate experience. “SPI is like a fire at which embers get started and re-heated if they start to go out from being isolated. Once you’ve been at SPI, you can go out and start your own fires.”

Alastair McKay, the founding director of Bridge Builders, points out that “very few people in the world are doing this work” – that is, addressing how the church deals with its own issues, such as congregational disenchantment with members of the clergy, usage of limited church space, modern versus traditional styles of worship, extent of outreach to outsiders, and priorities for the church budget.

“We have to effect conflict transformation within the church itself for it to spill out,” says McKay. “Then the church will be a more dynamic witness to the world.”

Officially founded in 1996 at the London Mennonite Centre but operating independently since 2011, Bridge Builders also happens to be the oldest training center connected to SPI and its parent organization, the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP).

Inspiration for Bridge Builders can be traced to a three-day mediation course taught by Ron Kraybill in London in February 1994, says McKay.

Bridge Builders’ ties to Mennonite-style Christianity are extensive. Alan and Eleanor Kreider, Mennonites now living in Elkhart, Indiana, developed the London Mennonite Centre into a resource for British churches from 1976 to 1990.

Successors to the Kreiders included Nelson Kraybill, a Mennonite church leader in the United States (who is also Ron Kraybill’s brother) and Mark and Mary Thiessen Nation, who co-directed the London center from 1997 to 2002 and who are now faculty members at EMU’s seminary.

McKay, raised nominally Anglican, became a member of a small Mennonite church associated with the London Mennonite Centre, and grew to play a leadership role in many of the Mennonite-initiated projects in that city.

One of those projects in 1995 was a voluntary community mediation service in one borough of London. Within a few months, it was clear that well-meaning individuals couldn’t maintain the service in their spare hours. This was an early lesson in the need to secure a financial base for conflict transformation work, so that staffers could be hired.

Preparing to lead

In the fall of 1997, McKay, his wife Sue and two children moved to Virginia so that McKay could pursue a master’s in conflict transformation and thus be better equipped to follow his calling. “There were various conflict resolution MA programs in the UK,” says McKay, “but their focus was largely international” and none offered him the opportunity to concurrently take seminary classes for credit, as EMU did.

After studying with Ron Kraybill, John Paul Lederach and HowardZehr, among others at CJP, McKay felt he had gained a “wider perspective, thinking not just about mediation, but systemically about conflict.” He next did a seven-month internship at the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center outside Chicago. By the time he and his family returned to London in 1999, he felt he had “brilliant preparation for launching a pioneering service [Bridge Builders] on a full-time basis.”

Lederach became a member of Bridge Builder’s “council of reference” from the start and has remained so. Current CJP faculty member David Brubaker and McKay maintain regular collaboration on both sides of the Atlantic – McKay will be co-teaching “Leading Congregational Change” with Brubaker at EMU’s seminary in a summer 2015 session (he also co-taught a seminary course with Brubaker in 2006).

Stronger churches handling conflict better

The Mennonite congregation in London never grew beyond a few dozen people, and currently has less than 15 active participants, probably because it never viewed its mission as gaining recruits or church planting, says McKay, but rather as introducing the Anabaptist-Mennonite approach to Christianity – especially pertaining to war, violence and peacemaking, as well as living out one’s beliefs. Along the way, the Mennonites realized they also could help British churches to function more healthily.

McKay became the first full-time director of Bridge Builders and remained so for nearly 16 years, while adding a doctorate of ministry from the University of Wales and embarking on a path toward being an Anglican clergyman. At Bridge Builders, he was assisted by a succession of young Mennonite volunteers from North America, including Sharon Kniss ’06, who majored in justice, peace and conflict studies, and Sam Moyer, a 2014 nursing graduate. In March 2015, in anticipation of being ordained in the Church of England and assuming a half-time curacy, McKay handed his executive director responsibilities to Colin Moulds, a Bridge Builders’ associate who had been running his own mediation and training company.

Is McKay still a pacifist, as he was as a Mennonite? “Absolutely,” he says, “I see this as integral to faithful Christian discipleship.”

One of the ongoing challenges of Bridge Builders has been financial solvency. Bridge Builders got off the ground initially and added staff in the middle 2000s with core money funneled through various Mennonite church agencies. But it has needed to be self-supporting since 2011 through a combination of fees collected for services and fundraising. And that has not been easy.

McKay, Moulds and the other trainers charge for their services, of course, and their carefully planned and timed trainings receive rave reviews. But UK churches have slim or no budget lines for educating and equipping their staff and lay leaders. “Eventually, I hope it will be embedded in churches’ DNA that they need to allocate funding to obtain support for transforming conflict and functioning healthily,” McKay said.

Bridge Builders courses range from one-day sessions with a limited agenda – such as “facilitating difficult meetings” and “leading well under pressure” – for a cost of 60 British pounds (about $90 U.S.) to five-day residential workshops for an average of 745 British pounds (about $1,124 U.S.), including training, materials, room and board.

Careful resourcing

The advanced residential sessions – where people who have been through foundational courses are then empowered to themselves be trainers – are offered in comfortable, but not plush, retreat or college settings, with a maximum enrollment of 20.

Participants receive print and PDF versions of material copyrighted by Bridge Builders. Some of the material would be familiar to people at other Mennonite-inspired peacebuilding training seminars, such as an adaption of the MCS version of Ron Kraybill’s Personal Conflict Style Inventory (which is a combination of the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument and the Gilmore-Fraleigh “style profile.”)

If participants want to use the Bridge Builders materials to lead their own trainings, they are asked to pay fees. For each 50-page training manual reproduced in full, for example, the charge would be 5 pounds (about $7.50 U.S). “We want to know how our material is being used,” explains McKay, “and the fees charged for using our materials provide us with a small additional revenue stream.”

Five thousand trained

Two participants in Bridge Builder’s “training of trainers” course held November 11-13, 2014, at St. Michael’s College in Cardiff, Wales. (Photo by Christopher Dobson)

McKay estimates that Bridge Builders has reached 3,800 people through its shorter workshops and 1,300 church leaders through the five-day foundational courses.

As McKay was wrapping up his work with Bridge Builders, he sought feedback from the network of people he had trained over the years. In the last Bridge Builders newsletter prepared by his hand, he wrote:

The overall impression that these responses have left me with is that Bridge Builders’ training courses have achieved much of what we set out to do; that they have had a lasting – and sometimes life-changing– impact for people who have participated in them; and that we have made a real contribution to our wider goal of transforming the culture in British churches of how leaders lead and the way they handle conflict. This helps me to finish my work with Bridge Builders with the sense that we have served the Church well, and contributed to her life and her service of the world in fulfilment of God’s loving purposes. That’s a good note to be leaving on.

All Bridge Builders’ trainings are tightly programmed, down to 15- and 30-minute segments of time. Want to know what you might get from a training? Just peruse the Bridge Builders website, www.bbministries.org.uk, where (as an example) you’ll find these outcomes for the five-day foundational Transforming Church Conflict training. By the end of the course, said the website, participants can expect to have:

Developed greater awareness about their communication style and its impact on others.

Reflected on Biblical resources related to conflict.

Enhanced their skills for communicating effectively in times of conflict.

Experienced and practiced skills for facilitating meetings.

Learned ways of building consensus and working with resistance in groups.

Developed their ability to analyze conflict and to identify what intervention may be most appropriate, such as mediation.

Considered ways to nurture a culture of creative engagement with conflict.

Reflected on the type of leadership needed in times of anxiety and tension.

Discovered ways that conflict can offer opportunities for growth.

A key takeaway from Bridge Builders: This group has honed a series of smoothly flowing workshops – where no important points get squeezed out of the agenda and all necessary reference materials are efficiently supplied. Within a British cultural context, Bridge Builders is a model of quality organization and delivery, perhaps because it does not try to be all things to all people. It limits its focus to improving one particular aspect of the United Kingdom – its churches.

Alastair McKay, MA ’99, with CJP restorative justice professor Howard Zehr when both were at SPI in the late 1990s.

When the Church of England installed its first woman bishop, 48-year-old Libby Lane, on March 8, 2015 – on International Women’s Day – it represented the culmination of years of debate, lobbying, anguish and finally respectful conversation to arrive at what one senior leader called this “new chapter…in the Church of England.”*

It’s the “respectful conversation” part that interests us here. Bridge Builders contributed to making this conversation possible and thus, arguably, to making it possible for the Church of England to arrive at this new chapter of ordaining women as bishops, without breaking up over it.

The respectful conversation was proposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s first “director for reconciliation,” David Porter. Porter proposed that a full day of the General Synod’s “business time” in July 2013 be devoted to facilitated dialogue in small groups. Alastair McKay, MA ’99, then executive director of Bridge Builders, contributed to the design of the day and referred a dozen people trained by Bridge Builders to be facilitators of these small-group conversations.

“Such dialogue is about seeking a way to grow in understanding of one another,” wrote McKay at the time. “It opens up the possibility of exploring how each participant has arrived at a particular position, and why some things are important to him or her. It gives participants a chance to engage with one another’s story. And it offers the prospect of real and deeper listening to one another.”

Moving away from the debate mode marked by entrenched positions, the conversation mode requires time and a “skilled facilitator who can maintain a calm presence in the face of others’ anxiety,” said McKay. The facilitator needs to establish “safe space” by establishing a clear process and securing a commitment to the process.

The aim in July 2013 was to encourage participants to understand each other’s positions and to grow in mutual respect as they did so, McKay said. “The two key fruits of any effective dialogue process are that of journeying together and of building relationships.”

When the members of the Synod later moved to a formal decision-making context, they were more moderate in their language than they had been previously. They appeared to treat those with different views more respectfully, rather than as stereotypes.

“As Christian disciples, we need to expect that we will disagree with one another,” wrote McKay of that era before the Church of England shifted its historical stance and permitted women to be bishops. “What becomes critical is how we disagree, whether we can stay in one another’s company on the journey, and whether we can deepen our relationships with one another in the way that Jesus longed and prayed for, for his disciples.”

Facilitated dialogue helps on a much smaller scale, as well. In a local parish recently, a church leader trained by Bridge Builders was wrestling with this contentious issue in his congregation: the use of a digital projector and screen to display the words of the worship service.

“Having learned a thing or two at Bridge Builders’ residential and one-day courses,” wrote James (not his real name), “I started with a Bible study on the handling of conflict in Acts 6, then asked everyone in the room for their opinions…. ‘What makes you think that? What is your underlying concern?’

“There was some vigorous disagreement. Some quite difficult things were said…We asked for ideas to meet one or more underlying concerns – we got several, and then looked at them to see which might be effective at meeting those concerns. It became clear that there was a good consensus on two or three principles – that we wanted to keep using the projector, but that the screen was in the wrong place and the words weren’t always easy to see.” Everyone agreed to set up a task force to recommend practical solutions.

“It felt as if we’d had a grown-up conversation in a Christian spirit,” said James. “It had taken us from some anger to a sense of moving forward together.”

* The legislation permitting women to be bishops in the Church of England was adopted in November 2014.

Two decades before Bishop Dinis Matsolo journeyed from Mozambique to the United States to take three courses at EMU’s 2005 Summer Peacebuilding Institute, he was a peacemaker forged in the cauldron of one of the worst wars Africa has seen.

“If you have a gun, you’ll use it…. If someone provokes you and you have a gun, you’ll say, ‘I’ll kill you – I have the power to do this,’” Matsolo told Peacebuilder, by way of explaining why his Methodist Church of Southern Africa promotes nonviolence as a way of life in Mozambique.

This is a country where almost everyone over the age of 40 has fought with a deadly weapon or has family members who did so. And everyone knows people who met violent deaths. During nearly three decades of warfare – starting with a fight for independence from Portugal, followed by 16 years of civil war – it is estimated that Mozambicans handled 10 million firearms, or one lethal weapon for every two persons.

Matsolo gave another example: “If you see a lion in your path and you don’t have a gun, you won’t walk toward it – you’ll find another way. If you have a gun, you’ll feel falsely protected by it and will walk into danger.”

Matsolo’s remarks came during an interview in late 2014 in his office in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo. As district bishop, Matsolo oversees Methodist churches throughout Mozambique serving 16,000 members, almost all traumatized in some way as a result of warfare or its aftermath.

A brief history

Mozambique’s war of independence against Portugal officially ended in 1975, with the triumph of Frelimo, the group that spearheaded resistance to colonial rule.

But the country was left with many armed fighters and little else. Illiteracy stood at 90%. Infrastructure was non-existent. In 1977, Frelimo formally declared itself to be a Marxist-Leninist party with a mission to replace capitalist practices with a socialist economy. Political and military support came from Soviet-aligned countries.

An opposition group, Renamo, emerged with backing from white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, and civil war ensued from the late 1970s to 1992. Widespread atrocities occurred amid economic collapse and famine.

Mozambique’s churches and mosques were under constant attack during this era. Leaders were killed or disappeared. The Catholic Church was regarded as a lackey of the former colonial rulers, and the other religious institutions were viewed through Frelimo’s Marxist lens that religion is “the opium of the people” and therefore useless.

But faced with a country in utter collapse – with a death toll exceeding one million and five million people displaced – the governmental and party leadership of Frelimo took an extraordinary step: it held a three-day meeting in 1982 with the leaders of the principal religious bodies in the country.

Then-president Samora Machel (a former leader of the Frelimo freedom fighters) acknowledged that he needed the help of religious leaders to put the country on a better path. And the leaders readily responded. Their institutions, touching 90% of the population in some way, had been the only ones functioning through all the years of fighting, despite being stressed to the breaking point.

Thereafter church leaders shuttled between Frelimo and Renamo through the late 1980s and into the early 1990s. Their first meeting with Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama took place in 1988 in bush controlled by his guerrilla fighters. With infinite patience, the church leaders sought face-to-face negotiations between the warring parties.

The church leaders needed, and received, help from leaders in other countries – some meetings between Frelimo and Renamo representatives were held in Kenya; the final series of peace negotiations were held in Italy over many months. Initially, the meetings yielded little.

By early 1992, “the worsening drought in Mozambique was leading to increased attacks by hungry Renamo fighters on civilians and driving many to flee in search of safety and food,” wrote Anglican bishop Dínis Salomão Sengulane and Catholic archbishop Dom Jaime Gonçalves in a 1998 Accord article. “The irony was that the negotiating teams, enjoying the luxuries of Rome, seemed little concerned by the impact of the drought and the plight of ordinary Mozambicans.”[1]

In September 1992, during an impasse in the Rome talks, Archbishop Gonçalves (one of the four official mediators) wondered, “Did either of the parties sense any urgency or responsibility because mass starvation threatened?”

Matsolo, Gonaçalves, Sengulane and the other church leaders were careful not to be perceived as taking sides – they knew it was essential to be viewed as neutral parties focused solely on the well-being of Mozambicans as a whole. In their quest for peace, wrote the Accord authors, the Mozambican churches adopted these principles:

Look for what unites rather than what divides.

Discuss problems step by step.

Keep in mind the suffering that so many people endure as war continues.

Work with the friends and supporters of both sides; this is

Remember the deeper dimensions of peace such as forgiveness, justice, human rights, reconciliation and

Word with other groups – the power of the churches being much increased by inter-denominational

On October 4, 1992, Frelimo and Renamo signed the Rome General Peace Agreement. Renamo agreed to transition from being a rebel group to being a political party that would stand for election against Frelimo. But the struggle for peace wasn’t over.

Alfiado Zunguza & post-war peacebuilding

In 1993, Mennonite Central Committee sent a couple in their late 50s, Sara and Fremont Regier, to Mozambique as country co-directors. In The Mennonite (March 2015), Sara said this was their most difficult placement in their three decades of service work.

Mozambique was a dangerous place to live for anyone – “people were coming back from refugee camps to find homes destroyed and looted,” said Sara, now a widow (Fremont died of cancer in 2010). But Sara also remembered that Mozambican church leaders “had an amazing love for Christ, a desire for peace and a strong sense of call,” she wrote.

Boaventure Zitha, coordinator of the weapons-exchange program

The Regiers encouraged Alfiado Zunguza, a Methodist pastor who was active in the peace and reconciliation work of the Christian Council of Mozambique (CCM), to enroll in EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Program (SPI).

Before going to EMU, Zunguza helped launch the CCM’s “Turning Guns Into Hoes” program. This was an ambitious nationwide program that aimed at demilitarizing the population. In exchange for turning in guns and other military artifacts, people received useful items, such as sewing machines, bicycles, farm implements and construction materials.

Boaventure Zitha, CCM’s long-time coordinator for the weapons-exchange program, told Peacebuilder it brought to life the prophetic vision of the Biblical Micah: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.”

Many of the 800,000 weapons collected from 1995 to 2014 (when international donors stopped paying for the useful items offered in exchange) have been destroyed under controlled conditions. But some have been safely dismantled and used to create intriguing sculptures displayed widely in Mozambique and internationally in galleries.

In addition to collecting weapons, the CCM has helped communities embrace former soldiers – “it’s an African tradition that sons and daughters must always be welcomed home,” said Zitha – even if these children have maimed and killed people and wreaked destruction. Elders and chiefs oversee purification and reconciliation rituals (often slaughtering animals for communal meals) to enable ex-soldiers to return to their home communities, he explained.

Subsidized by the United Methodist Church USA, Zunguza took his first four SPI courses in 1996.

When Zunguza returned to Mozambique after his summer of peace studies, he and his church established a department of conflict resolution and reconciliation to do ongoing peace work.

The next year, 1997, the United Methodist Church offered Zunguza the opportunity to be a full-time master’s student in conflict transformation at EMU. It was a difficult decision. He would have to leave behind his wife Carla and daughters, one of whom was a newborn. With Carla’s support, he took what they viewed as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

CJP founding director John Paul Lederach recalls having Zunguza in two classes in 1997, when he wrote a paper outlining the founding of something similar to SPI in Mozambique.

“Hearing John Paul and other professors talking about conflict transformation as a strategy to address conflicts from interpersonal to systemic change, I came to the conclusion that this was the kind of strategy Mozambique needed to move from a conflict-habituated society to a peaceable country,” Zunguza recalled recently.

“I learned that numbers matter in nonviolent actions, and getting more people excited and committed to conflict transformation was a great way of promoting change in a peaceful and sustainable way,” he added. “Launching an institute similar to SPI, and directed to Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa, was a strategic move to expand the number of peacebuilding activists in Mozambique. Thanks to SPI, we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel.”

Dinis Matsolo, bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa

In 1999, Zunguza returned home and led his church department to expand beyond church-initiated mediations and reconciliation meetings to becoming a broad-based center for conflict transformation named JustaPaz.[2] As an independent organization, JustaPaz was able to reach a larger constituency, though it was still backed by its founding church, with church representatives on its board.

“JustaPaz was our baby,” Methodist bishop Denis Matsolo told Peacebuilder with a satisfied smile. Matsolo views the 1992 peace agreement in Rome (which he called a “ceasefire” agreement) as simply a door cracked open that JustaPaz needed to help people walk through constructively.

“Peaceful co-existence is a process, not an event,” said Matsolo. After the ’92 agreement, the next step was “concentrating on creating a community-based culture of peace.”

“We [Mozambicans] had to grow enough to understand that we can live together and wear different political T-shirts and think differently, because diversity is not a problem. There’s richness in diversity. It’s only a problem if the others think it’s a problem, if they think, ‘If you are not part of us, you are against us.’ We needed to create a safe space for dialogue.’’

One of the first initiatives of JustaPaz was working with its own base constituency, the Christian Council of Mozambique, which Matsolo led as general secretary.

Role of religious peacemakers

The religious bodies of Mozambique had weathered 30 years of warfare without turning on each other. None had ever formally lined up with one of the political-military groups, despite the fact that most of the resistance leaders came from Presbyterian or Methodist backgrounds.

When Methodist pastor Joao Damiao Elias received his first church assignment in 1991, he found himself in northern Mozambique amid a largely Muslim community. “I invited them to my church, and they came. They invited me to the mosque, and I went. We had no problems!”

But not having problems did not mean that the religions were formally cooperating with each other.

Joao Damiao Elias, Methodist pastor active in interfaith work

The Muslims were strong in the north and along the seacoast (due to a history of trade with Islamic countries), the Catholics were in the vast majority in central Mozambique, and various Protestant churches had spread their wings in the south.

Traditional religious practices continued everywhere – followed by perhaps half the population – often mixed with the institutionalized religions of the region. Plus there were small groups of Jews, Hindus and Baha’is. Families were often divided, as explained in a fall 2014 article published by the United Methodist Church:

Members of the church itself were split between the two parties, Renamo and Frelimo. Sometimes even members of the same family had backed different sides during the war. Now they were all expected to live and work and attend church together.

In2006 JustaPaz began facilitating “constructive dialogues” among the various faith groups through interfaith symposiums held in allregions of the country. Soon thereafter, JustaPaz began training individuals from each religious tradition to play peacemaker roles in theircommunities and to also train others to play those roles.

Over eight years, hundreds of leaders went through JustaPaz trainings, designed to make local religious institutions, often the only community hub in remote areas, more effective in responding to simmering conflicts, community development issues, poverty, HIV/AIDS, and other local matters of well-being.[3]

Keeping elections honest

Anastacio Chembeze, head of the Electoral Observatory

In another step toward a community-based culture of peace, a coalition of religious and civil society groups founded the Electoral Observatory in 2003 to address fears of corrupt electoral processes by independently observing the voting and the counting of votes.[4] Its executive director, Anastacio Chembeze, has been trained at both JustaPaz and a sister institute, the Africa Peacebuilding Institute (when it was in Mindolo, Zambia), instructed by Babu Ayindo of Kenya (MA ’98) among others.

When a Peacebuilder reporter asked to visit JustaPaz during October 2014, Zunguza requested a two-month postponement of the visit, explaining that everyone associated with JustaPaz would be working non-stop during the weeks around the national elections, scheduled for October 15, to ensure “free, fair and transparent elections” and to head off violence. When the polls opened, the Electoral Observatory had 2,500 observers around the country to monitor the voting.

“On election day, we had one terrible example,” Chembeze said when the Peacebuilder reporter finally visited in December. “There was a shooting and the polling station with its election materials was burned. In two other places, there was some fighting, with property damage and people injured. These were stains on the elections.

“I don’t believe these have affected the outcome of the elections, but there are things we cannot excuse – we need to be tough on this. We can’t settle for 85% peaceful elections; we’re aiming for 100%.”

In Mozambique (indeed in many countries in the world), the victors in elections play out a “winner-takes-all” scenario. With political power comes access to resources, so electoral battles are hard fought. Power, once attained, is not easily relinquished. This is one of the reasons why fighting, believed to be linked to the survival of one’s group, often erupts around election time.

In 2013, a decade after the Electoral Observatory began its work, the Parliament of Mozambique decided to set up a National Electoral Commission. Parliament appointed Abdul Carimo Sau, general secretary of the Islamic Council of Mozambique (one of the founders of the Observatory), to chair this commission, made up of appointees from disparate groups in the political spectrum.

To prepare for their work together, Carimo dispatched his six sitting commissioners to JustaPaz’s summer peacebuilding institute for two weeks of training. He himself attended the two-day opening conference that JustaPaz always holds before the two-week session.

Abdul Carimo Sau, general secretary of the national Islamic Council

“We knew each other from our organizational roles,” said Carimo, in explaining the reason he sought JustaPaz training for his commissioners. “This gave us a chance to know each other in other ways, beyond our organizational boundaries.”

Carimo also thought the training would enable the commissioners to “speak the same peace language and use the same skills” when working with others in the broad network of JustaPaz-trained people. “JustaPaz gave us small books [for reference], and I use them.”

With Muslims about half as numerous as Christians in Mozambique, Carimo notes with satisfaction that “all religions in this country work together in a peaceful environment.”

“It becomes a catastrophe for a country or a continent when religious leaders use religion to promote their political aims. Our constitution has both freedom of religion and the separation of church and state,” he told Peacebuilder. “I think this is very important for the stability of our country. We can be a model for others.”

On dialoguing with citizens

Beyond improving the electoral process, JustaPaz aims to foster constructive dialogue between governmental decision-makers and those affected by their decisions.

“Civil society has the power to change the way governance is conducted,” Zunguza explained in the September-October 2014 New World Outlook. “Otherwise, government officials will use the divisions in society to maintain their power. Civil society must challenge this assumption of power and hold the government accountable.”

One activity for which many Mozambicans wish to hold their government accountable is the extraction of resources, often by foreign powers. Currently the most visible foreign power is China.

Near the waterfront in downtown Maputo in late 2014, signage in Chinese, Portuguese and English announced the construction of conference-resort facilities by Chinese firms. One of the most modern buildings facing the water was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs headquarters, built with money from the Chinese government.

“A third of all roads in the country are being built by Chinese companies in addition to the auditor-general’s office, Maputo International Airport, national soccer stadium, national conference center, communications networks, and water supply projects,” wrote David H. Shinn in “China’s Involvement in Mozambique.”[5]

“The Chinese are denuding the country of its timber. In fact, they’re extracting as many natural resources as they can. They’re destroying our environment,” said one small business owner. “I’ve protested against this. Our government is permitting too much of this, with little benefit to the people.”

Mozambique is a poor country by any financial standard. On its list of 187 countries in the world, the International Monetary Fund ranks Mozambique as No. 181 in gross domestic product per capita (pegged at $1,046 in 2013).

Major funding to stabilize Mozambique from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and other international organizations also comes with pressure on the Mozambican government to repay at least some of the money.

On the surface, therefore, it may be understandable why the government is willing to sell whatever it can to get money into its coffers for getting out of debt and for (one hopes) providing roads, schools, hospitals and other services to its citizens.

But the people living in the regions most affected by the sell-off of natural resources don’t necessarily agree. And here is where JustaPaz is trying to be helpful.

Zunguza pointed out that development plans can either worsen or ease conflict, depending on how these plans are implemented. The trainings of JustaPaz encourage “officials to reflect critically on the implications their development policies would have on the local communities. Were their policies helping to reconstruct the country or just creating more conflict?”

To be clear: JustaPaz doesn’t position itself as a critic of any government. On the contrary, it views government as “a strategic partner in peacebuilding and development,” said current JustaPaz executive director Francisco de Assis. “You can’t have security and stability without a functioning government, supported by the communities it serves.”

Working with police, judges, courts

Tomás Passuane, national director of police training

In the legal arena, JustaPaz is helping law-enforcement officials to be more humane, more respectful of human rights.

Tomás Passuane talked with Peacebuilder at an outdoor café within eyesight of the national police headquarters for Mozambique. Inside that multi-story, security-tight structure, he heads the training program for 30,000 police working across Mozambique. Each year, 3,000 fresh recruits join the police force, all of them under the training oversight of Passuane.

In 2004, Passuane was one of two Ministry of Interior officials dispatched to accept JustaPaz’s offer of two free courses for each ministry official. Passuane chose to take a one-week module in conflict transformation and another in mediation and negotiation.

With his doctorate in psychology and warmly humble demeanor, Passuane would seem unlikely to need training in empathic listening and compassionate justice. Yet he says he was overly tough on people in his first 18 years as a police officer, and only began to change after he took the JustaPaz trainings. “I used to be in the investigation unit,” he said through a translator, “and I now feel I did not act like a professional then.

“I recall a case when I beat a boy arrested for theft and didn’t give him time to talk to me. Then, at the end of the day, he said he had not been the one who stole and he told me who did it. I made a mistake because I was not an active listener, the way I am now. Now I make time to discuss deeply the issues.

“It is common in rural areas for victims and offenders to be willing to sit and discuss issues and to dialogue to resolve conflicts,” he added. “It is common in rural areas for offenders to apologize and for the parties to reconcile with each other. Our police need to understand that these are good practices and they need to support them.”

Passuane returned to JustaPaz’s two-week summer institute in 2008 and took two more courses. Since then, he has helped form a department within his police force to specifically deal with domestic violence.

The biggest change for him? With a smile, he simply said, “My wife was the first to applaud my JustaPaz training.”

Ideally, if Passuane had the budget, he would use JustaPaz to train all his new police officers. Second-best would be for JustaPaz to train one or two police officers in human rights, who could then be trainers in each of the 16 police districts.

Marlene Rosária Mafundza, a human rights attorney

Marlene Rosária Mafundza is an attorney, a recorded hip-hop singer, and a human rights activist, specially concerned for women. “Torture by police – it’s a culture in Mozambique,” she told Peacebuilder in excellent English. “I hear stories every day.”

After taking one JustaPaz course in human rights and the law, Mafundza was invited to present a paper, “Gender and the Political Empowerment of Women,” at a JustaPaz-sponsored conference in mid-2014 on building political stability.

As a result of this exposure, Mafundza decided “it is super important for JustaPaz to train police. And to train judges too. And to make sure that citizens know their rights.”

JustaPaz executive director Francisco de Assis later explained that, since 2004, JustPaz has admitted two police officers per year into its two-week peacebuilding institute without charging for this service. If funding were available, JustaPaz would expand the trainings of police.

As for the courts, the Ministry of Justice did use JustaPaz to help train 960 judges and tribunal authorities in all 16 districts of Mozambique from 2011 to 2013, according to Samel Salimo, an advisor to the Ministry on community courts and rural tribunals.

These trainings were done in 16 groups of 60, who gathered for five straight days. “JustaPaz played a very important role in introducing restorative justice and mediation,” Salimo said.

It’s necessary to understand that Mozambique has two judicial systems that are intended to complement each other.

Samel Salimo, advisor on community courts and rural tribunals

There’s the formal system derived from the Global North, with judges listening to adversarial lawyers who argue over which laws have been broken, with what consequences for whom. This costs money and takes time, plus the courts are only located in the larger municipalities.

And then there’s a huge network of less-formal, more indigenous “community courts” – 3,000 of them – which deal with everyday issues, like the theft of a cow or domestic conflict or land usage, where the people involved speak up for themselves and the matter is discussed to arrive at a settlement acceptable to the community. “We get positive feedback about the community courts. More than half of the community judges are women. It doesn’t cost much, and it’s fast,” said Salimo.

But, as helpful as the community courts are, they would benefit greatly from more exposure to the conflict transformation techniques taught by JustaPaz, he added.

Waxing and waning with funding

In 2004, the year that Tomás Passuane enrolled in his first JustaPaz module, JustaPaz moved its offices from the business district of Maputo to a residential suburb, Matola, in pursuit of cheaper rent payments.

Over the years, the size of the JustaPaz staff has waxed to 15 and waned to four, depending on the size and type of grants secured for a period of work. For its 2014-15 work by its staff of 11 in a four-room office, JustaPaz expects to get 72% of its $350,000 (in U.S. dollars) budget from Bread for the World-Germany, plus $105,000 from the United Methodist Church. USAID also provides some funds for HIV-AIDS education work.

Relative to Angola’s 27-year civil war (costing millions of lives) after its independence from Portugal in 1975, Mozambique has done well. Its civil war ended after 16 years, with fewer casualties than Angola. Despite huge obstacles, Mozambique has made steady progress toward being a multi-political-party society where all religions, all ethnicities and both genders can live in their own ways without being victims of, or resorting to, violence. Religious leaders cooperating with each other to build peace, plus civil society organizations like JustaPaz, deserve much of the credit for this.

So do certain international funders who have chosen to walk alongside Mozambicans for decades (not just a year or two) as they resurrect their country from ashes: Bread for the World (funded by a consortium of Protestant churches in Germany); DIAKONIA Sweden (also a faith-based organization); the United Methodist Church; Catholic Relief Services; and some governments, notably those of Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland.

Suggestions for donors

Over the years, Mozambicans have come to know which donors are most helpful and which could be more constructive. In response to questions, Peacebuilder garnered these two pieces of advice for prospective international donors:

(1) Take the time to visit and see the needs and the results in person, rather than asking for voluminous computer-typed reports, each laboriously prepared somewhat differently in response to the demands of the funder. In the words of Boaventure Zitha, who runs the weapons-exchange program under the Christian Coalition of Mozambique:

If I’m trying to get people to give up their AK-47s, I’ll need a day to talk with people, two days to convince them to come to a meeting, and three days to have a meeting, and then I will get some AK-47s turned in. But when I report this to America, they’ll say, ‘Why so much time? Why did this cost so much money?’ But you can’t deliver change in two days. This is not like following a blueprint. And then I’ll have to spend time meeting the Americans’ demand for kilograms of reports. Half my time will be lost to producing reports. Why don’t they just come meet us face-to-face and see for themselves?

(2) Realize that the absence of open warfare does not mean the work of peacebuilding is over. On the contrary, peacebuilders will always be needed to transform conflict constructively. This is especially true in the absence of stable, trusted governmental institutions. In the words of JustaPaz executive director Francisco de Assis:

In the West, unless CNN comes in, people think there are no major problems. But every crisis, every war, really started long ago. That’s what needs to be recognized in order to prevent future wars. Humans can change for the better or for the worse – and that’s why the work of peacebuilders will never be over. We must never stop working at encouraging humans to change for the better, though none of us will ever reach perfection. Peacebuilding needs to be a line in budgets everywhere. Not just for a couple of years, or even a decade, but forever. We need to be doing this work for generations to come.

Footnotes

From “A Calling for Peace: Christian Leaders and the Quest for Reconciliation in Mozambique” in Accord, CJP professor David Brubaker, who spent early 2012 in Mozambique researching its peace process, confirms and applauds the role played by church leaders. (Immediately after the 1992 peace accord, Brubaker did peace education and conflict resolution trainings in Mozambique on behalf of UNICEF.)

There is also the JustaPaz organization in Colombia whose founder, Ricardo Esquiva, was among the visionaries who conceived of CJP in the early JustaPaz means “JustPeace” (combining the ideas of justice and peace) in both Spanish and Portuguese, though in the Mozambican version of the term, the “J” is pronounced as a hard consonant.

From “Justapaz: Peace, Restorative Justice, and Human Rights in Mozambique” by Christie House, originally published in the September-October 2014 of New World Outlook, a United Methodist Church magazine, posted umc.mission.org.

The groups were the Christian Council of Mozambique, the Islamic Council of Mozambique, the Episcopal Conference of the Catholic Church, the Human Rights League, the Mozambican Association for the Development of Democracy, the Centre of Democracy and Development Studies, the Civic Education Institute, and the Organization for Conflict

Emmanuel Bombande, MA ’02 (front, fourth from right), is flanked by his successor, Chukwuemeka Eze (black jacket), and Kwesi Ahwoi, then Ghana’s interior minister, at the opening of WAPI 2013 at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra. John Katunga Murhula, MA ’05, is on the far left of the photo.

The news coming out of Burkina Faso worried Emmanuel Bombande, MA ’02, in late October 2014 as he boarded a flight for Europe. For months, the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP) – led by Bombande as executive director for 11 years – had been warning that Burkina Faso sat teetering at the edge of chaos. Would the country’s long-serving president try to cling to power by amending the constitution? Or would he respect the term limits placed on his presidency and step down?

The previous March, a WANEP policy brief had warned of a political crisis leading up to a 2015 presidential election:

The current political context in Burkina Faso is a cause for concern to WANEP and other [civil society organizations] in the region and beyond. Tensions around constitutional amendments and transitions, political intolerance, identity-based politics as well as a lack of institutions for managing grievances [are] evident in the run-up to the elections.

As the months went by, the political situation continued to deteriorate. Moderate voices began to say outrageous things. WANEP staff in the country began to fear for their safety. As Bombande traveled to Bruges, Belgium, for a meeting at the United Nations University, his heart remained behind in Africa, where tensions in Burkina Faso were heading toward explosive. He was constantly checking the news.

Emmanuel Bombande, MA ’02, immediate past executive director of the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding and one of its founders (Photo by Jon Styer)

As the meeting in Belgium began in the morning, Bombande’s Twitter feed began to confirm his fears. A crowd had gathered at the parliament building in the capital, Ouagadougou. By the first coffee break, the situation had worsened: parliament was in flames and the military appeared to have seized power. “The whole country was on the brink of total disaster,” he recalls.

The crisis in Burkina Faso was following a depressingly familiar script. President Blaise Compaoré had first come to power through a military coup in 1987. Four years later, he won election as the country’s president. Compaoré went on to serve four terms as president, despite a constitutional amendment in 2000 setting a two-term limit. He circumvented this with a friendly ruling that the term limit could not be applied retroactively.

Even by that generous interpretation of the rules, though, Compaoré would not have been eligible to run again for president in 2015 – unless the constitution were to be amended again. That’s exactly what Compaoré tried to do, and that was the matter being debated in parliament when the mob set fire to the building, as Bombande followed along in horror on Twitter. The following day, Compaoré resigned his office and fled the country, leaving an officer from his presidential guard in apparent control.

The regional implications were also troubling to Bombande. With violent extremism spreading throughout the Sahel – Mali, northern Nigeria, Chad, Niger – another collapsed state would have afforded extremism with another power vacuum to fill.

Theory to practice

From the WANEP policy brief:

A period of instability could prove disastrous for other countriesin the region…, already enmeshed in various levels of insecurity….Burkina Faso’s political instability could provide more grounds forwidespread insurgencies and rapid deterioration of human securityin the region.… The huge presence of unemployed youths and smallarms proliferation in a region with a history of civil wars provide a fertile recruiting ground for extremists.

This sort of policy brief lies at the heart of one of WANEP’s core missions in West Africa: the coordination of an early warning and response network for conflict. The network is an early example of the ways WANEP co-founders Bombande and Sam Gbaydee Doe, MA ’98, worked to translate peacebuilding theory into on-the-ground results in a part of the world ravaged time and again by brutal wars.

“Both of us who played a leading role in the founding of WANEP also found ourselves at EMU precisely because of its practice orientation,” recalls Bombande. “One of the things we have repeated and repeated is that at EMU it was not just knowledge and theory, it was its practice orientation.

“EMU allowed us to rapidly bridge the gap between theory and practice, and that is what we wanted in West Africa.”

In the theoretical sense, an early warning and response network is a set of processes and mechanisms by which people, organizations and governments can anticipate, identify and quickly respond to small conflicts before they escalate into bigger ones. As put into practice by WANEP, the structure is built on people across the region trained to monitor conditions and issues affecting them and their neighbors.

There are now more than 260 of these monitors spread throughout the region (eight of them in Burkina Faso). They read the local papers, listen to the radio, follow the gossip at the market, and chat with their neighbors. Many of these monitors also maintain their own sub-networks of monitors who represent the entire community – men and women, young and old, members of whatever different ethnic and religious groups are present.

WANEP runs this early warning network in partnership with ECOWAS, an intergovernmental organization made up of 15 West African nations. The network (formally called ECOWARN) is run out of the ECOWAS Commission headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria, where WANEP’s liaison office to ECOWAS is located.[1]

Spotting nascent problems

Using a detailed, web-based reporting template, the network’s monitors regularly report on points of friction within their communities. Suppose an argument over politics turns ugly in the market. The monitor in the area would send a report up the chain to the WANEP national office, which then passes all reports it receives to the liaison office and the ECOWARN situation room in Nigeria. Collectively, patterns can emerge and nascent problems can be identified before they turn into big and very unpleasant surprises.

“The whole system is built on people who are active participants,” says Bombande. “Every day we’re monitoring each country…. What we can begin to see, graphically, are things like rising political tensions.”

The result: documents like the policy brief on Burkina Faso that warned of a deteriorating political situation seven months before the crisis came to a head.

That policy brief alone wasn’t enough to avert violent conflict altogether. Tens of thousands of protesters battled police in the streets of Ouagadougou, parliament was set on fire, a dozen people were reported killed, and a military officer briefly appointed himself the head of state. But the response, informed by the early warning system, was both quick and focused.

“Because of the prior work that had been done – with all the analysis, the early warning, the policy brief and the advocacy – what was significantly different in this situation was that [the response] did not take even hours. It did not take a full day. The entire region knew exactly what needed to be done,” recalls Bombande, who returned from Belgium several days later and plunged into the response effort.

Comparatively peaceful transition

Leaders from the United Nations, ECOWAS and civil society organizations, with WANEP playing an important role, were soon in Burkina Faso working to ensure that an interim civilian government could form and agree on a clear path to open elections in the near future. All too often in the past, Bombande says, people and institutions responding to crises in Africa have tended to “trip over one another.” In this case, however, the coordinated response at various levels, he continues, “brought an enormous pressure to bear on the military.”

And it worked – by mid-November, the former Burkinabé ambassador to the United Nations was sworn in as the country’s transitional president. Full elections had been scheduled for October 2015. After two tense weeks, Bombande began to relax. The system bent, but it didn’t break. Violence broke out, but it was quickly contained.

“We could have been talking about thousands of deaths,” says Bombande. “And we could have been talking about chaos on a regional scale.

“Burkina Faso is simply inspirational. People now know that they can change [their government]…. I think this is a very good sign and that the early warning network has made a very significant difference.”[2]

History of WANEP and WAPI

In 1998, after becoming one of the first students to earn a master’s degree from EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Sam Gbaydee Doe “left EMU fired up to translate a dream into a reality,” he told Peacebuilder in 2010.

“I dreamed of a regional movement of civil society that would collaborate with regional intergovernmental bodies to restore not just stability in Africa but democratic freedom and prosperity,” said Doe, who is from Liberia.

Back in West Africa, he connected with Bombande, who had recently been working on mediation of tribal conflicts in his native Ghana (and who went on to earn a master’s degree from CJP in 2002). Together, the two men founded the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding, or WANEP, in late 1998. The group’s first operating funds came from a $200,000 grant from the now-closed Winston Foundation for International Peace.

One of the earliest programs of WANEP was aimed at women. In 1999, WANEP set up the Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET). Doe had met a fellow Liberian, Leymah Gbowee, in whom he saw leadership potential in the face of a war that had decimated their country for more than a decade. As a result, WANEP hired Gbowee as its WIPNET representative in Liberia.

“Her courage and leadership in mobilizing women as a WIPNET staffer earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011,” says Bombande, adding that the documentary “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” features extensive video footage of WIPNET borrowed from WANEP. (Gbowee joined Doe and Bombande in earning a master’s degree from CJP in 2007.)

By 2000, WANEP had an annual budget of $1.2 million and 300 member groups from 14 West African countries.

“The profound thing was the speed at which ordinary people mobilized for peace,” Doe told Peacebuilder.

As interest in the new initiative grew quickly, however, the region’s peacebuilding needs became apparent.

“We immediately discovered that there was a huge void in West Africa when you talked about knowledge, skills, capacity in conflict prevention and peacebuilding,” recalls Bombande.

To begin filling that void, Doe and Bombande organized a series of practical peacebuilding skills trainings in the region – including larger events in both English- and French-speaking West Africa. Among the leaders were colleagues of Doe’s and Bombande’s from CJP, including professor Barry Hart and founding director John Paul Lederach.

CJP research professor Lisa Schirch, an early teacher at WAPI (Photo by Jon Styer)

These trainings led, in 2002, to WANEP hosting the first official session of the West Africa Peacebuilding Institute (WAPI). Modeled after SPI, WAPI offered classes over a several-week period on a variety of conflict prevention and peacebuilding topics. One of the teachers at the first WAPI was CJP research professor Lisa Schirch, who spent eight months in Ghana working with WANEP and developing the first training manual for its women’s group, WIPNET. (Current SPI director Bill Goldberg, who is married to Schirch, also worked with WANEP during that period.) CJP graduates Austin Onouha (from Nigeria), John Katunga Murhula (Kenya), and Gopar Tapkida (Nigeria) have all taught at WANEP.

Since starting WAPI, “we have not looked back,” Bombande says. “Every year, there were new challenges that confronted us that required [us to] constantly develop different courses to suit the different threats that were very present in the region.”

To date, more than 450 people have studied at WAPI – many of whom remain active participants in WANEP’s regional early warning network or other peacebuilding programs. WAPI has been held each year since 2002, with the exception of 2014, when the Ebola epidemic in West Africa prompted WANEP to postpone it until March 2015.

Doe was WANEP’s first executive director, and served in that role until 2004, when he left to work for the United Nations. He now works for the United Nations Development Programme in New York City. Bombande became WANEP’s second executive director.

WANEP today

In addition to coordinating ECOWARN and running the summer institute, WANEP supports over 500 member organizations in 15 countries, through its network of national offices in each country. It has an annual budget of $2 million (U.S.) and 22 employees at its headquarters in Ghana, plus 45 in its national-level offices.

When “funding sources dried up in the informal spaces,” says Bombande – including the seed money provided by Mennonite Central Committee and grants from foundations – WANEP began to garner funding from European governments, including that of Austria, Sweden and Denmark.

Governments want to be sure that they’re investing in a durable institution, one that uses certain mechanisms and procedures, says Bombande: “Governments want to look at your institutional systems much more closely than your programs.” This means that WANEP now needs staffers with the administrative skills necessary to run the institution in a manner that satisfies its backers and to issue the necessary reports, in addition to staffers with the skills to launch grassroots initiatives, as Doe and Bombande had when they began WANEP 16 years ago.

The successor to Bombande, Chukwuemeka Eze, at WAPI 2013

“I think it is time for a new generation to take it to the next level,” Bombande told Peacebuilder in late 2014. Within months, he had handed the reins of WANEP to Chukwuemeka Eze, who had been with the organization almost from the beginning and who proved himself capable of increasingly responsible roles. And Bombande moved temporarily to being a fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, joining for a while his old CJP mentor, John Paul Lederach.

A few years ago, Bombande was feeling optimistic about the direction of West Africa: major advances in democratic governance were evident, and no civil wars had erupted since 2006, though there was post-election violence in Côte d’Ivoire in 2010-11.

Now, however, he feels sobered by the rise of extremism. He cites the Boko Haram movement in Nigeria (“a political scheme that has gone totally wrong”) and seeing formerly moderate people in Burkina Faso doing extreme things – “people who you never would have expected to go out on the street and to be yelling and saying outrageous things, including not caring for their own lives.”

Yet Bombande thinks this wave of extremism should motivate peacebuilders rather than discourage them. It just means that peacebuilders need to work smarter and harder, connecting with each other for support: “The worst thing we can do is think for a minute that we are not making an impact. We have been making an impact, and what we need to do is to constantly re-think, reenergize ourselves, re-motivate ourselves, in terms of what more we must do that will respond to these global challenges.”

Lessons from 16 years

Bombande was interviewed by a Peacebuilder reporter during an October 2014 visit as part of an ECOWAS delegation to the United States to confer with the Office of the UN’s

Under-Secretary General for the Prevention of Genocide. As Bombande pondered the distance he had traveled from dreaming of a peacebuilding organization in West Africa to representing that well-established organization in top-level meetings around the world, he offered these reflections:

With the United Nations Security Council “split down the middle,” peacebuilders cannot depend on the UN – or “on the global architecture” – to solve global crises, or even to prevent them. Instead peacebuilders must take the initiative to do this work themselves at the local, national and regional levels, interlinking with the experiences of other peacebuilders around the world and garnering international support whenever possible. But the day-to-day commitment and drive must be drawn from one’s own locality. “We [peacebuilders around the globe] must motivate each other.”

Emmanuel Bombande, MA ’02, WANEP head 2004-15, at WAPI 2013

Providing for everyone’s “human security” is a standard that needs to be met by political leaders everywhere, rather than cultivating their own political base on narrow racial, ethnic or religious lines, which is a prescription for future violent conflict.

Women are gradually assuming their rightful leadership roles in peacebuilding. WANEP’s second-in-charge is now a woman, program director Levina Addae-Mensah. Bombande recalls recently watching another confident, skillful woman, Edwige Mensah, running a WANEP training session in Dakar, Senegal, and thinking that she hardly resembled the shy young woman who had ventured into a WANEP office 10 years previously.

The understanding of what it takes to rebuild a country after it has been torn by war must change. Too many governments and large international organizations think it is sufficient to support the holding of democratic elections and the training of police and military to “keep the peace,” as was done in Liberia. But peace in Liberia and elsewhere can only be sustained if poverty and injustices are addressed, education built up, and healthcare provided. In short, underlying socio-economic structural issues must be addressed, with international support.

WANEP maintains a database of what WAPI-trained people have done and are doing to make a difference on the local level. The bravery of WAPI people has been inspiring – many have walked between lines of confrontation to defuse tensions. As an indicator of the risk, one WAPI trainee was killed trying to persuade a renegade general in Côte d’Ivoire to surrender to a UN compound. But also in Côte d’Ivoire, WAPI people crossed hardened, military-patrolled neighborhood lines, separating Muslim and Christian districts, to record conciliatory messages from Muslim leaders and play the recordings to Christian leaders and vice versa. This eased the feeling of “never trust these people because you simply cannot have peace with them.”

When Bombande looks back at the last 16 years of WANEP, he feels proud: “Can you imagine the situation if we did not do what we’ve been doing in peacebuilding?”

Bombande says patience and persistence are necessary. “I would encourage all of us, particularly the younger ones going through the CJP community, to look at it in this perspective – to never doubt for one minute how their contribution is, to the larger extent, what is transforming our global community, rather than depending on the global architecture, which in itself currently is a challenge.”

Footnotes

WANEP first signed a Memorandum of Understanding with ECOWAS to be the “implementing partner” of the early warning network in 2004, and just recently renewed it for another five-year

As the presidential election in Burkina Faso approaches on 11, 2015, there is still the potential for conflict.

Much of the information on Emmanuel Bombande’s early life was culled from an article by Augustina Tawiah published in The Junior Graphic, 2008. In March 2015, Bombande reviewed and confirmed the accuracy of this recapitulation of his life story.

When he was 6 years old, Emmanuel Bombande’s parents sent him from their home in Accra, the capital of Ghana, to live and learn their culture with his grandmother in Bawku, a town in the country’s rural north. When he wasn’t in school, Bombande worked in the family’s peanut and millet fields and went hunting with his uncles.

It was, in that sense, an idyllic way to grow up. But it was also a turbulent time in Ghana, and his town was not immune. Just after Bombande moved there as a young boy in 1966, Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, was overthrown in a military coup. Bombande and his elementary school classmates were sent to the town soccer field where the army was celebrating the news. “I remember the soldiers brought out all the pictures of Nkrumah from the various government offices, poured kerosene on them and set them ablaze. I still remember that image, the fire and the soldiers holding guns and forcing us to sing,” he told a Ghanaian journalist in 2008. “I used to have nightmares about the violence, and that affected my studies…. The violence occupied my thoughts any time I wanted to study. As a result, learning became difficult for me.”

Still, Bombande remained in Bawku through high school, playing on the school’s football (soccer) team and eventually becoming the sports prefect. Even at his Catholic-run school, however, ethnic differences sometimes turned ugly. He recalls a fight erupting over a dance competition that had been held to encourage the ethnic groups to appreciate each other’s distinctive cultures.

As a teenager, Bombande was a local leader of the Young Christian Students Movement. (Later, as a young adult, he became the Pan-African Coordinator of that movement.)

After seeing an ethnically based shooting, Bombande knew he wanted to work for peace. By the time he left to study social science at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in 1984, he’d embraced St. Francis of Assisi’s prayer: “Make me an instrument of your peace.”

In 1990, that conviction led Bombande across the continent to Nairobi, Kenya, for a job with International Young Catholic Students. Four years later, he became a program officer for the Nairobi Peace Initiative (NPI).*

At NPI, Bombande reported to director Hizkias Assefa (a founding faculty member of CJP, and NPI director from 1990 to 1997) on conflict mediation in various parts of Africa. One of the first conflicts he worked on with NPI was between warring ethnic groups in northern Ghana – allowing Bombande to put his peacebuilding skills to work in the place where violence in earlier decades first pushed him into the field.

By 1998, Bombande returned to Ghana to co-found the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP). After first serving as WANEP’s director of programs (where he continued to help mediate other ethnic conflicts in northern Ghana), Bombande became WANEP executive director in 2004. During that time he worked, taught and consulted with many other international and regional groups. Bombande has served as chair of the board of the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, and in 2005, was honored (alongside former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan) with the Millennium Excellence Peace Award.

In early 2015, after more than a decade leading WANEP, Bombande stepped down at age 54 and took a short-term fellowship at the Kroc Institute for International Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame.

“I think it is time for a new generation to take [WANEP] forward,” he told Peacebuilder. “But I know I’ll be around in the background to mentor and to coach.”

* The Nairobi Peace Initiative was birthed by Harold and Annetta Miller, both early ’60s graduates of EMU who were then Mennonite Central Committee (MCC)’s representatives in Kenya. They employed Hizkias Assefa as NPI’s first director in 1990. Assefa has taught at SPI since the mid-1990s. The seed money for NPI came from MCC. To this day, NPI holds annual trainings in peacebuilding.

Florina Benoit, MA ’04, is at the water’s edge (her arm extended) in this 2014 photo of villagers engaged in a water-improvement project. (Photo by Debin Victor)

“I’m not here to be a tourist,” I protested to Florina Benoit, MA ’04. “I just have 18 hours here. Wouldn’t it be better to relax here for a while?” I could get away with whining to Florina – we had known each other for 12 years, ever since we were both graduate students at EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Now she was my guide on a whirlwind trip to India for Peacebuilder magazine.

Earlier, I had tried to keep up with Florina as she wove through the crowd around our jam-packed train. I hadn’t slept soundly on my thin plastic-covered mattress on a top bunk – with other sleepers breathing heavily nearby – as we traveled eight hours north from Chennai to Hyderabad to visit her former workplace, the Henry Martyn Institute (HMI).

At daybreak, I had climbed down from my bunk, trying not to disturb anyone, and stood by an open doorway near the toilet at the end of our train car, absorbing the beauty of the south Indian countryside for an hour or so. I felt no inner struggle – at that time, I knew nothing about the displacement of rural-dwellers for resource extraction and the destruction of scenes like the ones we were passing.

From the windows of the automobile that picked us up at the Hyderabad train station, I enjoyed low-stress sightseeing. The ride took us alongside the city’s 1,200-acre lake, with a 60-foot-tall statue of the Gautama Buddha towering on a small island, and past awakening streetside businesses.

But now, in the late afternoon, my energy was flagging. I was baffled as to why Florina wanted me to leave the institute’s pastoral premises, where I felt a strong urge to nap in my comfortable bed in a private room provided by our hosts. But she was persuasive and I relented.

That’s how I found myself on a stone platform after climbing 149 narrow, winding steps of the Charminar mosque-monument. I had ascended through one of four mammoth minarets, connected to each other by four grand archways.

Charminar’s significance

Charminar is smack in the middle of what’s called “The Old City” of Hyderabad, where the majority of the residents are Muslim.

As Florina and I gazed over a packed street scene below Charminar, a smiling guy who looked to be in his 20s invited himself to be our tour guide. He explained that the massive mosque visible on the right side of the crowded street was Mecca Masjid, dating to the same ruler as the one who built Charminar. The Masjid got its name from foundational bricks composed of soil brought from Mecca. The structure can hold 10,000 worshipers at a time.

At left along the street below was the Government Ayurvedic Hospital, housed in a colonial-era complex that was crumbling but still lovely. Judging by its name, the services within this complex were based on a Hindu-yogic medical tradition dating back to the Vedic age of India (ca. 1750–500 BCE).

When Florina and I exited Charminar, we passed an ornately decorated, tent-looking structure pressed against one side of Charminar’s massive foundation. This turned out to be Bhagyalakshmi, a Hindu shrine dedicated to the Goddess Lakshmi. This shrine apparently began with the placement of a small statue in Lakshmi’s honor in the 1960s.

The visit to Charminar worked on me, as Florina knew it would: I began to grasp how closely Hindus and Muslims bump against each other in Hyderabad – a city where Muslims were in the majority before 1948 and now are a minority, except in the Old City – and how tenuously peace has been maintained (or not) over the last half century.

Later background reading revealed these violent conflicts in Hyderabad:

In September 1983, during a religious festival, certain Hindu organizations put up big cloth banners in the Old City calling for India to be declared a Hindu Riots developed in which 45 people were killed.

In December 1990, rioting raged almost two weeks – believed to have been initiated by non-locals for the national political gain of a particular party – which destroyed countless homes and businesses and cost the lives of hundreds of Hindus and The assaults were vicious: amputations, disembowelments and rapes.

On May 18, 2007, a bomb exploded inside the Mecca Masjid at the time of Friday prayers, killing at least 13 people and injuring

Under cover of night on November 1, 2012, Hindu temple officials began to do some construction at the base of Charminar, saying they were simply adding decorations to their Police stopped the non-permitted construction. Muslim-Hindu tensions rose.

Two weeks later, violence broke out after Friday prayers at the Mecca Masjid, when Muslims began streaming towards the Hindu shrine at Police intercepted them. Street-fighting ensued.

Florina murmured to me that the Hindu shrine looked bigger each time she visited Charminar. She, a Christian, viewed it as a provocation to Muslims who treasure the Persian-Islamic cultural and religious heritage embodied by Charminar.

Our Charminar tour set the stage for a visit that evening to an Old City center for community gatherings and vocational trainings, sponsored by the Henry Martyn Institute, directed by staffer Abdul Majid Shaik. Majid, a conservatively dressed Muslim who is a former social work student of Florina’s, showed us classes of males working on computer hardware and networking, refrigeration/AC mechanics, and typewriting. He said such vocational evening classes attract young Hindu and Muslim men from the neighborhood – 150-200 of them annually, from early teens in the typing classes up to early thirties in the other classes.

During the day, he said, girls and women from the neighborhood came to religiously mixed classes, often sewing or embroidering together. They generate a bit of income sewing clothes for neighbors and friends. This, Majid explained, makes the men in their families more willing to let them come to the center. They also can take classes in literacy, typing and hair styling.

Separately, the men and women learn about HIV-AIDS – a major health issue in Hyderabad – and have access to an HMI-supported health clinic staffed by a physician and a nurse.

In addition to learning useful skills, all students were guided to talk to each other about their lives and religious practices, and to respectfully share parts of each other’s celebrations and festivities. Mixed-religion picnics and other outings are occasionally organized.

Thus HMI lives out its stated goal: “To work in riot-prone areas on ways to build supportive and sustaining relationships between communities through development and empowerment, leading towards peace and cessation of communal violence.”

HMI publications contain heartening stories of the way residents in the immediate neighborhood have learned to protect each other during violent flare-ups in the Old City, such as this one: “Three Muslim women, bowing down to perform their evening prayer, hear the anguished cry of their neighboring Hindu sisters and their children, and rush out to take them to shelter.”

Between 1971 and 2002, the Henry Martyn Institute occupied office space on a busy thoroughfare in Hyderabad. For most of those years, it was called the Henry Martyn Institute of Islamic Studies, focused on interfaith dialogue. The 1990 riots catalyzed the institute into reconsidering its role in Hyderabad.

In 1999, the name was changed to the Henry Martyn Institute: Centre for Research, Interfaith Relations and Reconciliation, reflecting its fresh focus.[1]

In 2002, following successful fundraising, Henry Martyn moved to five acres on the outer edge of Hyderabad, where it has established a retreat-center atmosphere, with a cluster of modern buildings amid well-tended grass, flowers, trees and a pond. It feels like an oasis of peace alongside the crowded bustle of its home city.

Catering to young men, electronics classes organized by HMI bring together neighborhood Muslims and Hindus to interact peacefully. (Photo by Bonnie Price Lofton)

In the preface of a peacebuilding manual published by HMI in 2007, former institute director Dr. Andreas D’Souza described HMI’s post-1990s ecumenical focus this way:

… to provide space for Hindus, Christians and Muslims to build relationships; to make available conflict transformation workshops in violence-prone areas such as Nagaland, Manipur, Kashmir and Gujarat; to make possible women’s interfaith journeys, causing women from different countries, races, creeds and castes to travel together to understand what interfaith relations and conflict transformation mean from woman’s perspective.

Andreas also wrote about deciding, after the 1990 riots, that “intellectual dialogue alone is of little consequence if it does not help in transforming the lives of the dialogue partners.” He wanted the institute to add a “praxis” (i.e., practice) component to its academic study.[2]

As a result, Andreas and former associate director Diane D’Souza focused on development work in the riot-affected slums of the Old City of Hyderabad in the 1990s – initiating and encouraging vocational training for men and women in mixed-religion classes, healthcare outreach, and mixed-religion schooling for children.

Stephen Gonsalves, MA ’03, an HMI board member who then represented Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), encouraged the institute to complement its praxis of development with the praxis of conflict transformation.

Embracing conflict transformation

The idea seriously took root in 1999 with the arrival of Ron Kraybill, one of the founding faculty members of EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. With special funding from an MCC donor in Canada, Kraybill was able to settle his family in Hyderabad and to use a year-long sabbatical to set up a conflict transformation team within the Henry Martyn Institute.

Staffers Diane D’Souza and Ramesh Prakashvelu quickly absorbed Kraybill’s teachings, integrated them with their own experiences, and began putting them into action. They especially liked the concept of experiential and reciprocal learning, wherein workshop participants tap their own life experiences, play active roles in the workshop, and are teachers as well as learners. In short, everyone learns from each other, including the facilitators from the participants.

From 2004 to 2011, HMI offered a post-graduate diploma in peacebuilding that could be earned in nine months. (HMI’s academic department continues to offer a nine-month diploma program with focus on Islam and interfaith relations.) Today, intensive on-campus training for 30 participants occurs via the South Asia Peace Workshop, which runs in the early fall for a week or more (depending on the year and the coursework offered) in a manner similar to SPI.

The Northeast

From its earliest years, HMI’s conflict transformation team wasn’t content staying close to home. Staffers gave trainings in distant conflict-ridden regions of India, especially its Northwest.

India’s troubled Northeast floats apart from the India featured in tourist brochures – it’s like a huge balloon connected by a slender land thread to the Indian subcontinent.

The region consists of Sikkim, plus seven contiguous states: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura. In three of these states, the majority of people identify themselves as Christians, a legacy of missionaries in the late 1800s. Indigenous (“animist”) religious practices prevail in most places, even among many who call themselves Christians, Hindus or Muslims. These states comprise 209 tribes, speaking 175 languages mostly belonging to the Tibeto-Burmese category.

“The region is known for the longest insurgency and ethnic violence in India,” says the 2007 HMI peacebuilding manual, from which the foregoing statistics were taken. “There are over 100 armed groups in the region carrying various identities and espousing various liberation ideologies.”

The start of HMI’s work in the Northeast can be traced to a three-week workshop on conflict transformation in Darjeeling in May 2000, facilitated by Kraybill, Diane D’Souza and Ramesh. The Naga Women’s Union Manipur then invited them to work in the Northeast. HMI staff thus began working in Manipur (from 2000), Nagaland (2001), Assam (2002), and Arunachal Pradesh (2002). “We began by building relations with key social, human rights and church-based peace organizations,” says Ramesh.

On the CJP alumni website, Aküm described one of the region’s peace initiatives this way:

In2008, I joined with other representatives of civil society organizations to form the Naga Forum for Reconciliation, with support from members of the Society of Friends in Britain and members of the American Baptist Church. The forum seeks to reconcile various Naga armed groups on the basis of the historical and political rights of the Nagas. The forum has been meeting with militant groups … and the groups are moving away from violence and mistrust toward fragile progress and decreased violence.

On the same CJP website, Babloo summed up the challenges peacebuilders face in the Northeast:

The cycle of violence keeps the region in turmoil. There are a number of insurgency groups vying for autonomy or outright independence.This in turn makes the [Indian] military use harsh measures. Great economic difficulties drive desperate people to join the insurgenciesand the cycle continues.

Leadership from Florina to Ramesh

Two years after completing her MA at CJP, Florina Benoit joined HMI as associate director of praxis, responsible for four teams: conflict transformation, community development, women’s interfaith journey, and tsunami relief and rehabilitation.

Florina shepherded to publication A Manual for Facilitating Peace Building Processes and brought in playback and interactive theater and puppetry, which complemented the arts-based work HMI had been doing through the visual arts, especially paintings.[3]

In her 30 months at HMI, Florina’s conflict transformation staffers led about 30 trainings per year – reaching about 600 people annually – largely in the Northeast, but also in Kashmir (with the India-Pakistan conflict and its effects) and Gujarat (west coast location of recurring riots and massacres between Hindus and Muslims).

In all her trainings, “I found people were hungry for ways to emerge from the cycles of violence in which they felt trapped,” says Florina. “The STAR approach [addressing the underlying trauma that fuels violence] proved to be highly useful to the trainees.”

While employed at HMI, Florina did doctoral work at Osmania University. After completing her PhD in 2008, she resigned from HMI to return to her husband (social work professor Ashok Gladston Xavier, MA ’04) and their home in Chennai.

As did Florina before him, Ramesh heads the praxis programs of the Henry Martyn Institute.

My first impression of Ramesh wasn’t of him – it was of his black T-shirt, featuring a dignified-looking American Indian man wearing an eagle-feathered headdress. From beneath a tan-woolen visor, Ramesh’s hair flowed loosely below his shoulders. He was not one who would blend into a crowd.

Ramesh holds a master’s degree in international peace studies from the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame. He’s been doing peace work for 16 years, often in sensitive situations that can (and do) regularly explode into conflict. Four full-time staffers and two associate facilitators report to him. Collectively, they train about 450 people per year.

I soon realized Ramesh’s appearance heralded his passion for indigenous peoples – for their connections to nature, for their spirituality, for their relatively egalitarian ways of living, for their need for justice. For survival.

A month earlier, Ramesh had directed the ninth session of the South Asia Peace Workshop, which centered this time upon three topics: the UN Declaration on Rights of the Indigenous People; the relationship between respect for individual/group rights and peace; and appropriate development alternatives for indigenous people.

Called “tribals” in the Northeast and adivasis in other regions, the indigenous peoples of India have been described as the most exploited people in that country.

Struggles over natural resources

“Nobody likes to have their land stolen,” said Ramesh, by way of explaining why tribals throughout India are distressed and choosing to resist in some manner.

“Successive Indian governments have lined up with corporate forces to grab the mountains, forests and seas – to extract resources regardless of the people living there – regardless of their ancestral rights and constitutional protections. And if the people resist their dispossession, they are often labeled as leftists or anti-development.”

Ramesh and his team are trying to offer tools for transformation that are alternatives to taking up arms. Throughout much of the Indian subcontinent, the possibility of warfare lurks just beneath the surface.

Immediately north of Hyderabad, for example, is the “Red Corridor.” This is a swath of central India where Maoist guerrilla fighters known as Naxalites are most active. Of India’s 84 million tribals, 70% of them live in this Red Corridor, where they are facing massive displacement and communal destruction in India’s rush to extract coal, iron ore, limestone, dolomite, and bauxite, according to National Geographic (April 2015). Dams for hydroelectric power are also being constructed. Amid this widespread extraction, the Naxalites combine intimidation, youthful soldiering, and populist appeals to flesh out their ranks of fighters. “Rather than reduce the imbalance between the rich and poor, mineral wealth has exacerbated the divide, adding pollution, violence and displacement to the daily struggle of those whose livelihood is locked up in the land,” said National Geographic.

Diverse team

The five who make up the core conflict transformation team at HMI reflect the diversity with which they must grapple in their work. Ramesh is a Tamil with indigenous sympathies, Robinson Thapa is a Christian tribal member from the Northeast of India, Jalaja Devi is a Hindu woman from Kerala, and Najma Sanai and Arshia Ayub (both associate facilitators) are Muslim women from Andhra Pradesh.

Veteran facilitator Robinson belongs to the Tangkhul tribe, one of 16 tribes in Manipur. He saw his father killed. Close friends and relatives were raped and tortured, if not killed. “I grew up in a place where violence seemed to be the only way to address the issues that we faced.” He himself once believed in armed struggle.

Out of curiosity, Robinson attended a workshop in Manipur on conflict transformation and peacebuilding and got hooked on the ideas – because “in spite of 60 years of armed struggle, we have not gotten anywhere. I now believe we can be nonviolent and continue the struggle in other ways.”[4]

Najma Sanai has a counseling practice in Hyderabad, where she particularly serves Muslim women like herself and seeks to improve parenting skills. She started on the road to being an associate facilitator at HMI when Ron Kraybill took her aside during one of his HMI trainings in 1990-2000 and said, “You have a gift for facilitating conflict transformation. Would you want to be a staffer here?”

She felt honored. “Ron’s facilitation skills were amazing. We looked to him as our guru.”

For years, she worked at getting peer mediation programs and other cultural shifts into the schools, but such change, she came to realize, must be sought within the system. “The schools would never give us the time we needed. They said, ‘We can’t spare teachers for two days,’ even for just two- or three-hour sessions. I learned an important lesson – the time, space and inclination must be there for a program to take off.”

Today, Najma works in both the praxis and academic wings of HMI. On the academic side, she regularly lectures on Islam and women’s rights, trying to dispel what she regards as myths pertaining to the religious basis of the subjugation of women.

The results?

Ramesh is not given to boasting. So when I asked him what the Henry Martyn Institute can show for its 16 years of conflict transformation work, he said modestly, “The amount of hatred and stress has come down in the areas where we’ve worked.”

Then he added, “People have stopped one village from burning another village because they knew it would become cyclical. We’ve seen those kinds of changes. But have we been able to stop something big? Not so far.”

It’s not that Ramesh doubts the value, the ultimate impact, of what his team does. It’s just that “you have to invest in the long term – it cannot be done on a one-time or short-term basis.”

Beginning in 2002, for example, HMI staffers worked patiently and persistently for two years to bring 42 leaders from different communities and tribes in the Northeast together for the first time to talk about their common problems and possible solutions. The logjam was broken by women in the communities, Ramesh said, who were the first to see the possibilities of such a meeting.

Now he sees increasing numbers of young people – some from human rights organizations, some from women’s groups – who want to collaborate on peacebuilding.

HMI’s conflict transformation work over the years has been largely supported by grants from church-based development and relief organizations, including Bread for the World-Germany, Mennonite Central Committee, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Church of Sweden, the Church of Scotland, and KAIROS – Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives. A handful of governmental agencies, such as the United States Institute for Peace and the Canadian High Commission, have also contributed.

When Ramesh and his team aren’t doing trainings or interventions (or preparing materials to do these – everything is customized to suit the context), they’re preparing reports for their funders or writing applications for further funding. They feel challenged to communicate the necessity of culture-sensitive, region-specific, participatory approaches to trainings that aim at empowering as many people as possible to do peacebuilding in their own ways, adapted to their own environments. This is not something that can be accomplished quickly.

Of the five proposals written for 2014-15, two yielded funding for HMI’s conflict transformation work.

“It may take 20 to 50 more years – or beyond my lifetime – to see the results of our work,” says Ramesh. “But if we do our work conscientiously, our descendants will benefit from its long-term effects.”

Footnotes

In its earliest decades – in the 1930s, 40s and 50s – the institute existed to acculturate Christian missionaries from Europe and North America who were intent on spreading the gospel among Based in six cities at different times, it served an evangelical purpose of some kind through the 1970s. Today HMI is directed by Rev.Dr.Packiam T. Samuel, who makes it clear in an interview with Peacebuilder that HMI harbors no proselytizing tendencies, instead promoting understanding of, and respect for, the positive attributes of India’s religions and ethnicities.

The information in the Henry Martyn peacebuilding manual will feel familiar to those who know another manual originally connected to Kraybill’s teachings, the Conflict Transformation and Restorative Justice Manual, published in five editions since 1989 by MCC (the latest issued in 2008).

The two articles dealing with playback and interactive theater in the 2008 MCC Conflict Transformation and Restorative Justice Manual were written by Florina Benoit and Ashok Gladston Xavier (her husband).

When this Peacebuilder was at pre-press stage in April, Florina Benoit conveyed the distressing news that Robinson Thapa had died after falling ill while conducting a workshop in Imphal, the capital of his home state.